Sunday, November 27, 2016

Trump as an Old-Fashioned Conservative

Subtract the reality TV hucksterism and Trump is a perfectly ordinary Republican of the 1920s, or so says Stephen Mihm:

Consider Trump’s core campaign message, from which he rarely wavered. Free trade is bad, and is responsible for the nation’s economic decline. Immigration is an existential threat to the American way of life. Global institutions, treaties, and alliances should be viewed with suspicion. Nationalism is a bulwark against globalization.

All of this seems heretical to today’s free-market, foreign affairs conservatives, but it’s actually just the revival of what once passed for party orthodoxy. In the 1920s, Republicans hated free trade, preferring protective tariffs. . . .

Republican suspicion of free trade found a corollary in suspicion of the open borders. Earlier in the 20th century, Republicans had fallen under the spell of writers like Madison Grant, whose polemical 1916 book, "The Passing of the Great Race," argued that the white Anglo-Saxon population would be inundated by the waves of “inferior” groups – Jews, Asians and other non “Nordic” peoples – unless immigration could be curtailed.

Of course, Republicans refused to join the League of Nations, and they opposed any involvement in European or Asian wars down to 1941. Anti-globalism remained at the core of Republican beliefs until 1952, when the internationalist Eisenhower became the candidate; the first strong free-trader to get the Republican nomination was Goldwater in 1964.

This fits with what I have been trying to say: that until Trump there was no real conservative party in America, and hadn't been since before Reagan or even Goldwater. Many Americans still long to wall off the world and keep things here just as they are, and the whole elite keeps telling them that what they want is impossible. Until Trump.

4 comments:

G. Verloren
said...

"This fits with what I have been trying to say: that until Trump there was no real conservative party in America, and hadn't been since before Reagan or even Goldwater. Many Americans still long to wall of the world and keep things here just as they are, and the whole elite keeps telling them that what they want is impossible. Until Trump."

Just because you aren't an isolationist doesn't mean you aren't a conservative. That would be like saying that just because someone isn't a radical communist revolutionary, they aren't a liberal.

This is an important distinction to make. Conservativism isn't a single philosophy, but rather a collection of different viewpoints that share certain qualities and trends. Some conservatives may want to wall off the world, but plenty of other conservatives want quite the opposite.

If you want to say that Trump has revived the platforms of Isolationism, Protectionism, Nativism, and the like, you'd be accurate in doing so. But to suggest that Republicans from the dissenting schools of thought which dominated the past half century of politics were somehow not actually "Conservative" is patently absurd.

What I'm trying to say is that the American "conservatives" who have held power over the past few decades have not focused on preserving the things that Trump voters want conserved. My archetypical and somewhat straw-mannish Trump voter doesn't care for Paul Ryan Republicans because he wants more security and stability, not less, and is not religious enough to really be excited by Ted Cruz. I think about the worst thing John Boehner could think to say about Obama: "you're destroying the world I grew up in." Who is fighting to preserve the world of middle class factory workers in Ohio towns?

Who is fighting to preserve the world of middle class factory workers in Ohio towns? No one with any sense. Despite people not wanting to hear it, the simple fact is that we can't possibly preserve that world.

And yes, I understand that feeling must be terrifying for the people in such towns. And yes, I absolutely believe something should be done to help and reassure those people, because to fail to do is cold and somewhat inhumane. But that "something" needs to be more than just empty promises made by a pathological liar to achieve the impossible and somehow magically uplift the white middle class by actively destroying the lives of the non-white lower class.

That "something" needs to be the government stepping in to offer economic assistance and help these people adapt to the new realities of the economy - offer affordable or even free education and retraining programs for workers with obsolete skills; offer tax breaks or stimulis packages to struggling municipalities to entice private businesses to create jobs in these areas; enact government programs to do things like create and renew public infrastructure to directly create jobs (like we did in the Great Depression); et cetera.

How about instead of spending $600 billion annually on our military, we divert $25 billion of that amount each year for 10 years to spend a total of a quarter of a trillion dollars helping our obsolete manufacturing communities to transition to new, modern economic systems?

Is spending only 96% of what we normally would on warfare really going to have any remotely significant impact on our national security, military readiness, international footing, et cetera? We'd still be spending more than the world's next twelve biggest military spenders combined. Can anyone sane person possibly argue that we can't defend ourselves adequately with such an absurd amount of spending?

What boggles my mind in all this is not only that we absolutely -could- fix our inequality problems in this country, but also that all the people in positions of actual power refuse to do so despite it being in their direct interests to do so.